Emma Stefansky

Emma Stefansky
Tomatometer-approved critic
Publications: Vanity Fair, ScreenCrush, Uproxx, Thrillist, Polygon

Movie Reviews Only

T-Meter Title | Year
62% Mosquito State (2021) The slow, hypnotic vibe of the movie lends a dreamlike quality to the proceedings, even though by the end it feels like more of a nightmare. - Thrillist EDIT
Read More | Posted Sep 15, 2021
83% The Swarm (La Nuée) (2020) The bugs themselves are horrifying, but it's the sound that will stick with you, looking over your shoulder every time you hear an insect start to buzz. - Thrillist EDIT
Read More | Posted Aug 11, 2021
94% The Hidden Life of Trees (Das geheime Leben der Bäume) (2021) A film like this, and the work it was inspired by, and the new age of understanding it encourages, is a source of hope, the knowledge imparted within indisputable and precious. - Thrillist EDIT
Read More | Posted Jul 30, 2021
88% The Green Knight (2021) It boldly reimagines one of the most famous Arthurian tales, and in doing so feels like a relic from an ancient era when the barrier was thin between the world of men and the world of magic, mystery, and everything green. - Thrillist EDIT
Read More | Posted Jul 26, 2021
96% Pig (2021) The world built in all of these little details is so immediately believable: This guy used to be, and perhaps still is, a big deal. - Thrillist EDIT
Read More | Posted Jul 20, 2021
47% Escape Room: Tournament of Champions (2021) While none of the rooms here quite reaches the heights of the ingenious upside-down pool hall from the first movie, there's plenty to appreciate in each one. - Thrillist EDIT
Read More | Posted Jul 20, 2021
59% F9 (2021) It is a little odd when the many #epic facedowns between Dom and Jakob fall flat, but at least you won't have to wait too long for a car to smash through a wall to move things along to the next part. - Thrillist EDIT
Read More | Posted Jun 25, 2021
67% Army Of The Dead (2021) Army of the Dead is more interested in playing with fun concepts than in actually being a fun movie. - Thrillist EDIT
Read More | Posted May 21, 2021
88% Oxygen (2021) Oxygen is a lean thriller that will hold your attention through all of its big reveals, using everything at its disposal to craft a story that's fun, tense, and never boring. - Thrillist EDIT
Read More | Posted May 13, 2021
75% Seaspiracy (2021) Seaspiracy is both well-researched and informative, and at times genuinely shocking... If shock and awe are what it takes to get the message across, then Seaspiracy is effective, if not particularly multifaceted. - Thrillist EDIT
Read More | Posted Mar 30, 2021
71% Zack Snyder's Justice League (2021) The fact that it exists at all feels like a gift. - Thrillist EDIT
Read More | Posted Mar 15, 2021
97% The Truffle Hunters (2020) It's a beautiful movie, but it also feels like a love poem to something the world is in danger of losing, the fires and clangs of industry and capitalism having no place in the small yet teeming world of this mysterious profession. - Thrillist EDIT
Read More | Posted Mar 5, 2021
79% To All The Boys: Always And Forever (2021) It's a comfort and a balm, the type of movie that makes you want to write love letters. - Thrillist EDIT
Read More | Posted Feb 19, 2021
69% Space Sweepers (2021) Space Sweepers imagines a grimy, rough-and-tumble future where lives are daily on the line, and yet it's one that I wouldn't mind living in. - Thrillist EDIT
Read More | Posted Feb 19, 2021
92% The Vast of Night (2020) A thoroughly immersive time capsule that recreates an era when the space above our heads contained multitudes, rascally Soviets could be hiding around any corner, and the nighttime was full of terrifying possibility. - Thrillist EDIT
Read More | Posted Feb 5, 2021
99% Wolfwalkers (2020) Directors Ross Stewart, Tomm Moore, and Moore's team at Irish animation studio Cartoon Saloon have outdone themselves, giving their new movie a special beauty that will make you miss the days when 2D animation was the norm. - Thrillist EDIT
Read More | Posted Dec 14, 2020
97% Sound of Metal (2020) Sound of Metal is a collectively disarming experience for everyone watching, and takes great pains to present the life of those with hearing impairments in a constructive way, without romanticizing. - Thrillist EDIT
Read More | Posted Dec 14, 2020
66% The Christmas Chronicles 2 (2020) Hawn and Russell are so cute together and so into it, I 100 percent believe that they actually are Santa and Mrs. Claus, who have come down from the North Pole occasionally throughout the last few decades to star in some movies in their spare time. - Thrillist EDIT
Read More | Posted Dec 1, 2020
66% Dolly Parton's Christmas on the Square (2020) I was expecting at least some weird dumb fun, but there's barely any of that in here, apart from Baranski singing, "Gotta get out of this town" like an emo teen in a coming-of-age indie movie. - Thrillist EDIT
Read More | Posted Nov 24, 2020
58% The Princess Switch: Switched Again (2020) Hudgens is delightful playing a vampy, evil character, which she hasn't gotten to do yet in this series. - Thrillist EDIT
Read More | Posted Nov 20, 2020
83% Proxima (2019) Proxima avoids feeling overly maudlin while presenting its characters' emotions in a way that feels totally natural, a drama with its feet on the ground and its eyes on the stars. - Thrillist EDIT
Read More | Posted Nov 11, 2020
100% His House (2020) The power of His House, though, comes not from the intermittent scares or constant building dread, but from the devastating reveal that makes up its final act, forcing its characters to reckon not only with the trauma they've suffered. - Thrillist EDIT
Read More | Posted Nov 5, 2020
49% Jurassic Park III (2001) Only Sam Neill could make a line like "It's a birdcage" so utterly frightening. - Thrillist EDIT
Read More | Posted Aug 12, 2020
88% Spaceship Earth (2020) Less a day-by-day recounting of what life was like inside the dome, and more of a portrait of a time when there seemed to be no limit to what humans would try out in the name of blasting our species into the stars. - Thrillist EDIT
Read More | Posted May 11, 2020
93% Bad Education (2019) Bad Education didn't even need to handle its material with such deftness and grace, and could have been content with just delighting in the true crime of it all, but that's the kind of thing that turns a good movie into a great one. - Thrillist EDIT
Read More | Posted Apr 30, 2020
59% Outbreak (1995) It's a weird kind of comfort food: as bad as it seems for us, at least it's not as bad as what's in the movies. - Thrillist EDIT
Read More | Posted Mar 16, 2020
91% The Invisible Man (2020) The thrilling, fun, and violent mode of The Invisible Man proves that sometimes some monsters are worth resurrecting. - Thrillist EDIT
Read More | Posted Mar 2, 2020
61% The Mummy (1999) It's really a movie for everyone. Maybe not mummies. - Thrillist EDIT
Read More | Posted Feb 26, 2020
62% The Call of the Wild (2020) The animation also looks quite good, when you get past the fact that nearly every landscape is altered or painted-over or completely fabricated in some way. I am here to say: Get over it! - Thrillist EDIT
Read More | Posted Feb 26, 2020
98% Parasite (Gisaengchung) (2019) It's so easy for otherwise good and normal people to do terrible things, and it's never entirely possible for them to escape their sins. - Thrillist EDIT
Read More | Posted Dec 11, 2019
36% A Christmas Prince: The Royal Baby (2019) Every scene in A Christmas Prince 3 that's not in the trailer feels like it was put there simply to pad out the empty space; every attempt at banter or jokes is partnered with a chuckle-heavy pause that drags for five seconds too long. - Thrillist EDIT
Read More | Posted Dec 5, 2019
36% In the Tall Grass (2019) The only character that is compelling is real estate tycoon dad Ross Humboldt, played by an entertainingly manic Patrick Wilson, who succumbs to the grass early on and makes for a really, really fun villain. - Thrillist EDIT
Read More | Posted Oct 7, 2019
26% Gemini Man (2019) Like Avatar, this is the kind of thing 3D was made for: a rip-roaring, visually sumptuous good time that brings all of the genre's flaws and cheats and tricks into the light and corrects them one by one. - Thrillist EDIT
Read More | Posted Oct 2, 2019
97% Knives Out (2019) It's such fun to watch a writer-director like Johnson get to play with all the familiar, cozy tropes before throwing everything out the third-story window. - Thrillist EDIT
Read More | Posted Sep 12, 2019
92% Ford v Ferrari (2019) Mangold's movie doesn't reinvent the wheel, but it sure leaves a pair of steaming tread marks in its wake. - Thrillist EDIT
Read More | Posted Sep 12, 2019
68% Joker (2019) The movie isn't badly made or even ugly to look at, but there's a mean, smug little heart at the center of it that, at best, irresponsibly frames a familiar male power fantasy as a revolutionary act. - Thrillist EDIT
Read More | Posted Sep 12, 2019
85% Once Upon a Time In Hollywood (2019) Most of the time it works, especially during its funnier moments -- and this movie is very funny. - Thrillist EDIT
Read More | Posted Jul 26, 2019
84% Crawl (2019) Crawl demands your respect for its antagonists: as soon as the water reaches your knees, humans are no longer the apex predators. Survival merely boils down to how well you can sneak by. - Thrillist EDIT
Read More | Posted Jul 13, 2019
90% The Lighthouse (2019) If not for Pattinson and Dafoe being two of the world's most recognizable working actors, I would believe this could be some recently unearthed treasure from an earlier era of filmmaking. - Thrillist EDIT
Read More | Posted Jun 11, 2019
60% The House That Jack Built (2018) Von Trier may be a provocateur, but his brand of provocation seems to be growing stale. - Slate EDIT
Read More | Posted Apr 8, 2019
33% The Predator (2018) The Predator kills the Predator in true alien sport-hunter fashion: gleefully smearing glow-in-the-dark entrails all over something beloved before finally ripping out its spine. - Uproxx EDIT
Read More | Posted Apr 8, 2019
62% Vox Lux (2018) A harsh examination of our modern fixation on celebrity that paints the present as a horrific, violent dystopia. - Uproxx EDIT
Read More | Posted Apr 8, 2019
57% Pet Sematary (2019) At an hour and 41 minutes, Pet Sematary is much too short for the kind of dread it requires to stack up a series of circumstances that could drive a father to do the unthinkable. - Thrillist EDIT
Read More | Posted Apr 5, 2019
57% The Beach Bum (2019) It's all incredibly fun, and hilarious, and weird, but with surprisingly earnest feelings of tenderness towards its subjects. - Thrillist EDIT
Read More | Posted Mar 29, 2019
84% The LEGO Movie 2: The Second Part (2019) The Lego Movie 2 ups the ante on the first hit with its elaborate setup and eye-popping new characters. - Thrillist EDIT
Read More | Posted Feb 11, 2019
74% Abducted in Plain Sight (2017) While it's easy to think that no one alive could be as naive as the Brobergs, the documentary is a sobering reminder of the power of manipulation, the failures of the justice system. - Thrillist EDIT
Read More | Posted Feb 7, 2019
61% Alita: Battle Angel (2019) This movie proves that, finally, Hollywood not only has the technology, but the imagination necessary to do a great story justice. - Thrillist EDIT
Read More | Posted Feb 4, 2019
19% Polar (2019) Polar isn't for everyone, but you can't say it pulls any punches. - Thrillist EDIT
Read More | Posted Jan 28, 2019
36% Glass (2019) Never a particularly subtle director, Shyamalan gives you all the clues you need to figure out most of his third-act twists, provided you know what you're looking for. - Thrillist EDIT
Read More | Posted Jan 15, 2019
51% Escape Room (2019) It's so much fun that the payoff is ultimately a convoluted disappointment, but I can hardly complain considering how many times I gasped or cringed or whispered "yesss" throughout the rest of it. - Thrillist EDIT
Read More | Posted Jan 8, 2019